Steve Johnson on productivity

One of the nicest examples of autodetection I experienced was when Dennis Ritchie and I were porting Unix to the Interdata 8/32. This was a big-endian machine, and we had to generate data for that machine on a PDP-11, write a 265  Chapter 10. Configuration magnetic tape, and then load the magnetic tape on the Interdata. A common error was to forget to twiddle the byte order; a checksum error showed you that you had to unmount, remount again on the PDP-11, regenerate the tape, unmount, and remount. Then one day Dennis hacked the Interdata tape reader program so that if it got a checksum error it rewound the tape, toggled ‘byte flip’ switch and reread it. A second checksum error would kill the load, but 99% of the time it just read the tape and did the right thing. Our productivity shot up, and we pretty much ignored tape byte order from that point on.
- Steve Johnson (on The Art of UNIX Programming)